Recently, Dave Winer linked to ijotEdit by Marc Barrot and David Weinberger lamented that it was SO good he might abandon his own "hobbyist" development. 

No David! Don't stop!

The whole thing is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

I first saw iJot at OPML Camp at Harvard 2006.I wrote it up back at my first blog, Everybuddy. I did a long forgotten presentation on SkinnyFarm, one of the first (and only?) RSS + SSE web applications. It's been long dead. The only remnant to it online is Jack Ozzie linking to it here.

OPML was hot at the time. Dave didn't attend. I think David Weinberger did. If memory serves, one reason Dave gave for not attending was that he thought it should wait a while till things got fuether along. Well, it seemed to me he was wrong for a while, but looking back maybe he was right, or maybe it's time to have the second one. ; )

Anyway, at that time I really thought that collaboration between people over RSS was about to explode. All my ideas focused around Twitter-like apps that used these open protocols and I even incorporated Instant Messaging into a few and was really looking closely at RSSCloud as a vehicle between the feeds and a real time interface. Ajax hadn't really arrived yet for real-time web interfaces, so IM seemed like the right place for it.

Little did I know at the time, that the seemingly "lost and forgotten" feature of RSS 2.0 called RSSCloud would emerge again four years later, along with its ATOM rival PubSubHubbub.

Well, of course Twitter came along some time later and certainly proved some of my ideas were headed in the right direction. But, as Dave would put it, the world needed some training wheels. Not all the pieces were in place for an open, distributed Twitter. They still might not be.

But, damn it's looking better. I've always felt a good identity system was a major reason a closed system like Twitter exploded where an open system might not work so well. And I think that remains true to this day, though a lot of progress has been made with things like Webfinger.

But the real point of all this is that while standards are great for protocols, we want a diversity of applications that work with those protocols. Maybe some day an application for web based OPML will emerge that the users crown as king, but we are far from that day.

We need developers to "hack" their own perspectives. Some ideas will die on the vine, some will be absorbed by other apps. It could be that iJot is missing the killer "feature" that makes it useful for thousands of users, whereas before it was only interesting to hundreds. It could be that Weinberger's app has that feature, despite being more embryonic in other ways.

So, again David. Don't stop just because someone is ahead of you, whatever "ahead" means.

Forge on! Or collaborate. But don't stop.

P.S. Just so you know that I'm not all talk, I'm working on a web editor. It doesn't do outlines (yet?) and just because Google Docs blows it away, I ain't stopping. Plus, I think Dave and I might learn something as I try to bounce it off of Scripting2.

Will it die on the vine? Maybe, But this is what we do.

 7/12/2010; 8:15:11 PM.   .